Thursday, April 22, 2010

Just a Couple Things From the Inside of My Head.

I think to myself all the time, "tonight I will write something for my poor neglected blog." Then I think up things to write about, and I'm all "Oh! That's a good idea," and "Hey! I'm going to write about this!" (whatever it is that's happening at the time) and then I come home and realize I've forgotten what it was I was going to write about. Then I realize I'm tired and then I wake up and the grey light of dawn is creeping through the spaces in my broken blinds.

My blinds have been broken for about a year now. I don't feel like buying any because I don't feel like spending any money on this shithole apartment. I don't even feel like cleaning it anymore. I'd rather burn it to the ground and start all over. I've been thinking about the amount of money my boss is going to have to cough up in a few weeks. He's going to pay me a double salary as well as well as pay for my one-way plane ticket, and the new person's plane ticket, as well as other little things like a bye-bye dinner for me, and a lot of stuff to make this apartment presentable. When I arrived here the place had these totally fugly orange pleather chairs that were surely snagged from a noraebang gone out of business. Their fugliness has been super-fuglified by the fact that Kamikaze has been jumping up on them, employing his claws to do so and has shredded them quite nicely. All of them. My boss is a cheap little rat-bag, but I doubt he's going to use duct tape on them and pass them off as okay. Likewise with the broken blinds, whose pull stringey chain thing broke and now when I want to get some light in here, I tack them up manually with a couple of big laundry clamps. So ghetto-trailer parkish. The TV is near-dead. Everything on the screen is orange, and when the TV Fixer guy came to repair it months ago, he asked, "How old is it?" I told him I didn't know, at least eight years old. "I think maybe twenty years old" he guesstimated before declaring it un-fixable. It's watchable if you're watching something that's occurring in a well-lit studio or in the daylight. If the scene is at night, forget about it. The screen is black, so you can just listen to the dialogue and imagine what's happening. If there's no dialogue, tough luck. It's like the TV has been turned off.

I'm taking every single thing I've bought for the place when I leave, be it extra spoons and chopsticks or pots and pans. I'm still thinking that I'm going to do one more year in Korea starting in September. I'd like to have my last experience here be a positive one, and that's not really the case with the feelings I'm having as I leave this job. I'd also like to teach adults, and am going to be looking into teaching at a university. I'm not going to take a job that's not AWESOME, though. I'm looking for a LOT of vacation rather than a huge increase in salary, though it would be nice to get a lot of time off as well as buckets full of money every month. Anyhow, back to the glee I feel thinking about how much dough my cheap-ass boss is going to shell out in June when I leave. It pleases me. Makes me almost giddy.

Then again, I imagine it's going to cost me an arm and a leg just getting Kamikaze back to Canada. He's a big boy, and going to take up half the plane's cargo hold.

I noticed two dixie cups with cola remnants stuck in the recycling bag the other day. I knew it wouldn't have been any of the teachers that put them there, and furthermore knew that the only cola in the fridge was mine. So I wondered what the deal was. Two of my co-workers were in the office and said they hadn't drank any of my Coca-cola Light. The only other suspect was my nemesis Alice, who was teaching a class. I'd have to find out what happened the following day. So I came in and said hello and settled in and all that, and then asked her all casual-like, "Oh, hey. Did you drink my diet coke?"

No, she replied. She hadn't. And then she BLAMED IT ON THE STUDENTS!! This isn't the first time she's sacrificed the students, and the other times have been flat out lies as well. There's just NO WAY that a student would grab a cup, open up the fridge in the teacher's room and help himself to the contents. NO WAY. It's an absolute assuredness that Alice offered them the cola, no question. I just don't understand her thinking. She didn't buy the soda. Does she think it just magically appears in there? Where does she get off offering things that aren't hers to other people? (It's not the first time this has happened by any means. Whenever I go on a trip my candy supply, or ice cream I've bought has magically disappeared.) But then for Alice to blame the students when she gets called out,...it's disgraceful. Of course she didn't offer to replace the cola (and why should she, seeing as it was the evil students who drank it?) I should have called the boys in and asked them about it with Alice translating. It would have been fun to see their confusion,...though Alice would probably tell them in Korean "take the blame for this and I'll buy you a pizza."

So, there. I have written. I'll even do it again soon. I do have a bunch of pictures on my camera that I haven't uploaded that go along with posts that I haven't written. Honestly, I'll do my best to get 'er done in a very timely manner. If you've read this far and haven't fallen asleep I thank you. If you're still hanging in with me on this here blog, I really thank you. So, thanks!

3 comments:

A lot of unis ask their teachers to teach at summer and winter "camps," so if you want to keep teaching kids, you probably still can, all while teaching adults during the fall and spring. It's just a matter of finding the right uni.

Your departure represents a big loss for your school, but your sanity and happiness come first. I hope you can find a place where you'll be happy: a place where the faculty and staff are at least halfway professional, where you get a couple months' vacation and decent pay, where the students are at least somewhat motivated, and where the campus itself is clean and well-manicured.

I don't know anything about your degrees and credentials, but I do know that having some sort of TESOL or TEFL certification can open more doors for you, at the university level, than not having them will. If you don't have such credentials, my humble recommendation would be to take a couple months in Canada to obtain one. Once armed with the new paperwork, you'll doubtless find plenty of decent work opportunities in Korea. And who knows? If university life appeals to you, you might end up staying more than an extra year. Anyway, you're right: don't take a job that's less than AWESOME. Have a list of deal-breakers in your head (for me: no weekend work, no students below college age, no split shifts, and no evening block shifts), and you'll be fine.

Must be pretty cool, standing at the threshold of your future. Good luck with it.